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User blog:Lily Ford/Pacific Rim - Embargo-Free Review Roundup
Pacific Rim is out in just a four days, but the review Embargo for critics has officially lifted. A few critics have weighed in with their thoughts about Guillermo del Toro's latest genre flick. Here are a few snippets so far from publications on both the Internet and print. BE WARY: SOME REVIEWS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS: Please do not post spoilers in the comments if you gleam any out of respect for those who still want to go into the film marginally blind about the details. Loved it (4-5) Pacific Rim | The Upcoming Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars Launched into a world full of havoc and menace, the initial outlook is significantly ominous. However, Del Toro ensures spirits remain high with cheesy dialogue that is at times a little over zealous, but on the whole will satisfy those with a penchant for barefaced entertainment. The immense sense of inferiority evoked in the audience by every aspect of this film adds to the overall awe-effect – something Del Toro never fails to deliver. Pacific Rim | Fat Movie Guy Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars I went into Pacific Rim excited yet nervous that one of my favorite genres would be destroyed in the same way Roland Emmerich bastardized Godzilla with his 1998 remake. In great confidence I can assure you that director/writer del Toro and co-screenwriter, Travis Beacham, took everything great about Godzilla, Mazinger Z, Shogun Warriors, Gamera, Ultra Man, and every other Japanese Mecha movie and turned into the next generation of monster movies. We were hinted at gigantic monsters in movies like J.J. Abram’s Cloverfield, but nothing I have ever watched even comes close to the spectacle that is Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim | The Verge Rating: ??? Whether or not it sounds like damning the film with faint praise, the greatest virtue of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim may be that you can always understand what’s happening, what the characters are doing, and why they are doing it. After what seems like years of convoluted megamovies whose pretzel-like twists, turns, and double-crosses confound logic and confuse audiences, it’s incredibly refreshing to watch a film where the setup is simple, the mythology straightforward, and the execution consistently clear. Working on his biggest canvas to date, the director of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth introduces an entirely new world to audiences with a robots-versus-monsters scenario that includes the same sort of nerdy details and sci-fi jargon as its overcomplicated brethren, but under del Toro it all makes sense — and even better, he makes us care about it. Pacific Rim | Telegraph.co.uk Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars To call that idea original would be flatly wrong, as Pacific Rim owes a debt to every pulp, trash and sci-fi loan shark in town. The weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft, the monster movies of Toho studios, the mecha-anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and even Ted Hughes’s The Iron Giant are all tangled in its DNA. And the film’s opening sequence, in which the Golden Gate Bridge is torn down by what looks like a 300-foot-tall terrapin, pays affectionate tribute to the Ray Harryhausen creature feature It Came From Beneath The Sea. Pacific Rim | badassdigest Rating: ??? What makes Pacific Rim work isn’t one character or Jaeger or kaiju (although I think we’ll all have our favorites for sure), it’s the way del Toro and Beacham bring them all together. This is a movie about teamwork, about sacrifice and about getting past the bullshit to do something important and difficult. It’s a rousing movie about the way human beings can set their mind to something and accomplish it. Yeah, we’ve fucked up. Yeah, we’ve made mistakes. But we’ve also done incredible things, performed impossible feats and tamed some of the very forces of nature. When we’re at our worst we can be destructive, divisive and horrible. When we’re at our best we can change the course of the world with our will. Thought it Was Okay (3) Pacific Rim | Indiwire.com Rating: B-''' Too in love with itself to ever totally go off the rails, "Pacific Rim" doesn't qualify as the first full-on dud of del Toro's career, but it's hard not to get the sense that something's missing. By comparison, Gareth Edwards' 2010 DIY feature "Monsters" featured a similar invasion of colossal aliens, but deepened the premise by using it to explore post-catastrophe trauma and complicated the very idea of the invaders as legitimate bad guys. "Pacific Rim" never bothers to pull apart its juvenile conceits, nor does it take any clever stabs at the allegories embedded in its militant proceedings, a la Paul Verhoeven's ultra-subversive "Starship Troopers." Pacific Rim | Guardian.co.uk '''Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars Pacific Rim is entirely in keeping with much expensively-made effects-heavy cinema of the present time: it's put together with such artistry and such devotion that it can't help but be impressive as a visual spectacle. (Del Toro's devotion to Japanese monster movies is particularly evident.) But, like Man of Steel or The Dark Knight Returns, it can't quite bring itself to believe in its own pop-culture disposability and ends up paying the price. Pacific Rim | Hollywood Reporter (SPOILERS) Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars In most ways, this paradoxically derivative yet imaginative sci-fi epic is everything every monster movie since the beginning of time might have wished it could be: In no way pinched budget-wise, it's got first-class special effects, crafty behemoths that calculate and react to circumstances in non-dumb ways, a smart director who injects a sense of fun and surprise whenever he can, a fair percentage of characters you don't mind watching and a few decent plot twists. In this genre, that's saying something. Hated It (2-1) Pacific Rim | Variety.com (SPOILERS) Rating: ??? Of all the doom-laden fantasies the studios have rolled out this summer, “Pacific Rim” is the one pushing itself most aggressively as guilt-free entertainment, offering up an apocalyptic spectacle in a spirit of unpretentious, unapologetic fun. Which it will be, at least for those who measure fun primarily in terms of noise, chaos and bombast, or who can find continual novelty in the sight of giant monsters and robots doing battle for the better part of two hours. Viewers with less of an appetite for nonstop destruction should brace themselves for the squarest, clunkiest and certainly loudest movie of director Guillermo del Toro’s career, a crushed-metal orgy that plays like an extended 3D episode of “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” on very expensive acid. Pacific Rim | Film Stage 'Rating: C-' Expectation can be a terrible drug to come down from. With only the tiniest bits of information and foreknowledge, one can allow oneself to be intoxicated on the rush of expectation that comes from approaching a new film, especially one with a dynamite premise from a beloved filmmaker. The rush of the anticipation leading up to those first frames, and the seemingly fulfilling opening moments to follow, can bring an audience member a kind of moment immeasurable joy, creating a wave of euphoria that crests, breaks, and then rolls back the longer the film goes on, leaving behind only the flinty bedrock of a single thought: This is all there is. Category:Blog posts